Horizon 2020

European Union funding for Research & Innovation

Industry challenge

Controlling the exchange of documents, writing periodic reports and budgeting within a H2020 project involving multiple authors while using Microsoft Office Word is a challenge. Many e-mail messages are exchanged, and there is no real collaboration: it is ‘collaboration by assembly’: creating a report by assembling bits and pieces.

Assembling the final document from multiple documents having different formats can be a nightmare. Working with Office 365 or Google docs does not solve this problem either if it involves large or complex documents with multiple authors. Changes are stored at document level, creating a chaotic overview of versions. Furthermore, no specific H2020 templates and financial tables are provided. In a Document Management System (DMS) authors have to wait for each other while working on a text document due to file locking. H2020 specific tools only provide predefined templates and have limited collaboration functions.

Author-e Horizon 2020 solution

Our solution to these problems is Author-e: a comprehensive and easy-to-learn browser-based authoring & project management suite for European H2020 research projects. Elaborated collaboration functionalities facilitate and simplify writing, budgeting and project management. Author-e can send out detailed assignments to users directly linking to specific sections in the master document, thereby facilitating co-production with history management. The predefined proposal document conforms to the CSA, RIA, IA, ITN and SME templates and includes the correct budget tables and the specific template instructions. This ensures that participants can work on their scientific and budgetary sections, while the coordinator has a clear overview of the entire proposal. The integration between the financial module and the reporting module ensures that changes in finances are automatically reflected in the report. This allows for efficient management of man months and expenses and the generation of overviews for reporting (Financial statement).

Horizon 2020 proposal writing

This video shows in 3 minutes the working and benefits of the Author-e for Horizon 2020 proposal writing tool. Contact us at the FP-tools website for getting a quote.

Download the flyer here. For more information about the advantages of Author-e for Horizon 2020 proposal writing, budgeting, project management and reporting see www.fp-tools.eu, and contact us for an online demo.

.

Create, review and approve documents. Using workflows and tasks, insights in progress of e-learning documents and modules can be gained through the notification center.

Multi-channel publications. ﻿E-learning documents and modules can be published to multiple formats, such as Word, PDF, e-Pub, HTML and XML. This ensures any organizational requirement regarding publications can be met.

Central layout management. Templates and centralized standardization of fonts, font size, captions, text alignment and spacing ensure that all your documents are consistent with your corporate identity and organizational standards. Forms can be used to standardize data input.

Reusability of content. Sections and documents can be embedded in other documents. This enables modifications to documents to be reflected in all documents that use them, eliminating double maintenance, copy-pasting and confusion about what is the latest version.

Simultaneous writing. Authors can work on the same document at the same time. This prevents locking of documents, thus increasing efficiency.

Version control. All previous versions of documents and files are retained, and can be restored if necessary. This is absolutely necessary to comply with norms and legislation, and allows you to look back at documents that were effective in the past.

User access management. Roles & rights can be defined not only at the document level, but also at the section level. These rights are automatically inherited to sub-sections. This allows enforcement of refined access policies.

Digital signatures. Workflows can be coupled with digitally signing off tasks. This, combined with version control, ensures traceability of actions, as well as accountability.